Books

Last Train to the Midnight Market

Hour of the Ox

"​In Last Train to the Midnight Market, Marci Calabretta’s debut collection, she explores how one might feel if caught on a crowded train without a place to sit, forced to try and construct that seat without instruction, burdened by memory and secrets, burdened by loss and exile, headed toward an unnamed station that just might be home. This tightly coiled collection has the feel of a novel; her characters are real enough to break your heart." —Jim Daniels

"Marci Calabretta possesses a real knack for channeling her muse. Her metaphors slide like a dream one into another intuitively. Here is poetry you can lose yourself in, be delighted about, mystified over, taken aback and fulfilled inside." —Ron Starmer​​Finishing Line Press | ISBN: 978-1622292431

"Hour of the Ox is a timeless collection written by a poet of exceptional talent and grace, a voice as tough as it is tender. Poignant and beautifully composed, these elegies hum with emotional potency and moved me beyond measure. This immigrant story emerges through the hands, mouths, hearts, mournings, and voices of a family an ocean away and is exquisite, lyrical, and an incredible and rare gift. And then there is the brother who gently haunts this book and who will haunt readers, for just as we walk with our dead, so too does this brother with his sister, who lovingly illuminates his memory. I wanted to read these poems again and again. They have created shadows that this reader continues to carry, explore—and savor." —Crystal Ann Williams, contest judge

"A striking and rare combination of spare precision and rich details, Hour of the Ox tells a quiet, yet grand and universal tale of place and displacement, loss and renewal, illusion and disillusion. This is one of the most compelling books of poetry I’ve read in years, not simply because of its seamless craft, but more so because of its pure and urgent voice possessed by that ineffable quality that makes poetry, poetry." —Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet​"Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello’s powerful debut introduces us to a world where the modern elegy sings across ocean and bone, and where it’s possible ‘storms fanned from the ears of elephants.’ This magnificent book is ‘not a love song, nor a glossary of despair,’ but rather wholly enchanting and original, bearing the beauties and failures of the body and all of ‘what the sea asks us to return.'" —Aimee Nezhukumatathil

"Cancio-Bello follows Last Train to the Midnight Market’(2013) with a second collection that makes clear the qualities that secured her the 2015 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Beginning with ‘Anti-Elegy,’ Cancio-Bello summons life and death as she embarks on a mythic journey into her family’s past. Images of the sea and all that it contains, of travel and distant lands, create an ethereal setting. The emotional stronghold she creates using sparse language and vivid imagery fills the emptiness rendered by sadness and grief and expresses feelings of desire, obligation, and love. Drawing on the ancient tales of far-off places, Cancio-Bello contemplates the search for home and how the word home and the concept home establish themselves in our psyches and resonate with hidden meanings. As she prepares us for sorrow, she also reminds us of its retreat, and in this way emphasizes that life is an accumulation of experiences and perceptions." —Booklist

“Calabretta Cancio-Bello weaves Korean folktales, myths, and family reminiscences into a series of poems punctuated by the reincarnation of a dead brother as an octopus, a sunflower, a penumbra, a chrysanthemum.” --Santa Barbara Independent